Pricing
We publish directional prices because a council officer should be able to put SLS in a budget conversation without first scheduling a call.
Argus
Live air quality dashboards for UK councils
A live dashboard that shows the data you, your stakeholders and your citizens actually need to understand air quality where you are. The five South London boroughs (Southwark, Lambeth, Lewisham, Wandsworth, Greenwich) are live as our public showcase. Free to access, free to embed for community use.
Borough hosting
From £7,500
per borough, per year
A configured Argus instance for your council area or region. WHO-aligned ribbons, story-led area pages, monitor-grid coverage of every public network we ingest and any networks you've installed, the embeddable widget for council web pages, and a copy of our editorial methods documentation.
Setup typically 6 to 8 weeks from contract to live. Includes a methods walkthrough with your environmental health and comms teams.
Borough hosting with modelled surface
From £11,400
per borough, per year
Adds our 50 m modelled concentration surface across your area, anchored to DEFRA and GLA data. The modelled surface lets Argus answer 'what's the air like where there's no monitor' to give policymakers and residents relevant information. Live updating based on existing monitor data inside the borough (NO2 only, PM2.5 coming soon).
Maintenance includes quarterly model refresh, a half-day annual methods review, and an annual bespoke evaluation of the modelled surface vs your local data.
Multi-borough region
From £25,000
per year, five boroughs
For unitary authorities, combined authorities, or borough groupings who want a shared Argus deployment with regional narrative and cross-borough comparison.
Beyond five boroughs, talk to us.
Included with every Argus tier
Hosting, monitoring, infrastructure costs, data licences for the networks we ingest, the public embed widget, transactional email for alerting features, and reasonable support during UK working hours. We don't charge separately for any of these.
Not included
On-site sensor deployment (we partner with hardware vendors), bespoke web design beyond the standard borough template, and statutory document writing (that's a RHEA engagement or a bespoke project).
Clara
Personal exposure tool for residents
Clara is our citizen-facing Clean Air Planner. Residents answer a short set of questions about where they live, work, and travel; Clara estimates their personal exposure and points to the levers they can pull, personal and structural.
Clara for a council
From £3,000
per year
Clara configured for your borough or local authority area. Your branding, your local intervention map (LEZ, school streets, ULEZ status, active travel), your messages baked in. Hosted by us; you embed or link as you prefer.
Clara with full data layer
From £5,500
per year
Adds borough-specific background concentration data from our Pan modelling stack, so Clara's exposure estimates are calibrated to your borough rather than a national average. Recommended where comms teams want to use Clara as evidence in AQAP consultation.
RHEA
Intervention design, evaluation, and methods
Where Argus and Clara are hosted products, RHEA engagements are bounded delivery projects. We work to a written scope and deliver methods documentation alongside the headline numbers.
Single intervention evaluation
From £8,000
per project
A complete causal evaluation of one intervention. Typical scope: LEZ, CAZ, school street, LTN, or AQAP measure. Includes meteorological normalisation (deweathering), difference-in-differences or synthetic control as appropriate, diurnal fingerprint analysis, block-bootstrap confidence intervals, and a methods document robust enough for statutory citation.
Turnaround typically 6 to 10 weeks from data handover.
Multi-intervention or methods-heavy
From £17,500
per project
For evaluations covering multiple sites or cities, comparative methods across interventions, or where the question requires new methodology development. Recent example: the Scottish Low Emission Zones cross-city evaluation, where the analysis surfaced three null effects and one significant traffic signature.
Custom methods development
From £25,000
per project
For projects requiring new estimators, novel data integration, or sustained methodological R&D. Priced by scope.
Free
Free tier and showcase
Free indefinitely, no card required.
Argus public access
Every monitor, every borough page, every WHO verdict on the five South London showcase boroughs at argus.southlondonscientific.com. Use the data, screenshot the maps, cite the readings.
Argus embed widget for community use
Schools, community groups, charities, journalists: embed Argus borough widgets in your pages with attribution.
Aeolus
Our Python library covering 13+ air quality data networks worldwide, with deepest coverage of the UK. Open source on PyPI.
Hermes
Our Model Context Protocol server for UK air quality, published on the official MCP registry. Free for individual use; commercial integrations should talk to us first.
Power-analysis consultation
If you're scoping a RHEA evaluation but want to know first whether your monitoring data is sufficient to detect the effect you're looking for, we'll run a power analysis on your data and deliver a short note at no cost, provided we agree a scope for a follow-up evaluation if the answer is encouraging.
A note on how we price
Lower overheads, not lower quality.
We publish prices because opaque pricing is friction, and we'd rather people with small budgets feel welcome to engage than have us look big and unaffordable. The prices above reflect a delivery model with one principal scientist plus AI-augmented workflows; we charge less than other engagements because our overheads are lower, not because we cut corners.
What we don't do: undercut on quality, hide costs in change orders, or quote a low headline and bill on day rates afterward. The "from" prices above are real floors. If your scope is bigger, we'll say so before contracting.
Day-rate work (one-off advisory, methods review, parliamentary briefing, expert input on a paper) is £600 per day plus expenses.
How to start a conversation
For Argus or Clara
Tell us which borough or council area, what your statutory or comms deadline looks like, and which budget line this would sit in. We'll come back with a configured proposal inside a week.
For RHEA
Tell us the intervention, the rough timeframe, and which monitoring networks are in scope. If you have data already, we'll quote on data; if not, we'll include the data engineering in the scope.
For anything else
Get in touch. The contact form goes to a real inbox; we usually reply inside a working day.
South London Scientific Ltd is a UK limited company (17051218). Principal: Dr Ruaraidh Dobson, formerly Head of Data at the Clean Air Fund. We carry professional indemnity insurance and operate under standard SLS terms; both are available on request before contracting.